ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the new types of political conflicts and spells out their implications for state coordination and the efforts of international and regional organizations to contain the occurrence of political violence. According to the Heidelberg Conflict Barometer, there has been a steady increase in the number of yearly political conflicts since 1945. The research into conflicts at the macro level, covering how social aggregates like nations' or social groups' interactions are characterized by confrontation, has been conducted in two almost separate subdisciplines—international relations and comparative politics. Terrorism surfaces in a most brutal manner in the global conflicts in the early twenty-first century, and it is a question of a new form that is different from the classical terrorism of the French and Russian revolutionaries. Globalization comes with many political as well as economic conflicts. The data reported indicate that political conflicts have increased in number since 1945.
